Dragonica – Preview

I am not a big fan of platformer side-scrolling games, and I was quite sure that I am goin to write a negative review, or mediocre preview about Dragonica, a 3D side-scrolling MMORPG, coming from Gala Networks and Baruson Interactive, but that changed when I launched the game, and start playing.

Before you start the adventure you get to choose for your character, the appearance from a multiple selection of hair types, face, color and other things, so we have decent character customization from the start. I choose to become a warrior from the 4th classes available, Warrior, Magician, Archer, Thief.

From the beginning you are taught the game’s basics controls, combos and features, through text, and by a small cute flying creature, that helps you by guiding you through new events and encounters. A small problem is that half of the people won’t read the text, and press space to move on, and you will see them shouting on chat, how do I do x ? A common problem with today’s “gamers” but let’s move on.

Vagabond and Rookie?! Strange...

Once arrived in the first town your will be impressed with the atmosphere and features available for this small mmorpg, and also here you will meet the first players, since the tutorial was instanced. While exploring the town you will encounter several quest givers, marked with the exclamation point (thanks Blizzard), equipment dealers, mail box, guild managers, and even an estate manager.

On hunting grounds you can find dungeons entrances where you can complete missions (Hero Quests) which usually involves a boss monster, and at higher lvl of the missions requires a party, but you get at lots of items as reward, and in game currency. These missions are challenging, and the offer you a good reward upon completion to you and your party and they can be repeated on higher difficulty, for better rewards. Besides these instanced missions which are instanced for you and your party, the rest is open divided in hunting ground for specific lvls, where you encounter all kinds of monsters, require for your quest, or crafting needs.

Interesting enough is that the game has a journal similar to the tome of knowledge in Warhammer Online, which tracks you progress in the current zone, offers you information about quests and medal, rewards which you can equip them for some bonuses. I received one as an achievement.

Combat consists in combos created with your basic attacks, and your skills, which provides great visual rewards, and you get to see tool tip on what move you should next to continue the combo count. Also the higher is the combo count in a fight, the higher the mount of XP is that you receive from monsters.

When you advance in level you receive an amount of skills with which you can buy new skills for your character, each class having a specific tree of skills similar to Diablo 2, from passive skills that improve your damage to new skills that provides you with new attack abilities.

Graphics are very well done, everything is very detailed for this type of game and we also have a glow applied but it not hurting our eyes. The maximum resolution now is 1024×768, but until release this might be raised, but it can be played in window mode, and when you activate this, chat can be placed outside the game window, on desktop, which is a good feature.

Now i am really, really angry...

The music and sounds effects are also decent, where some NPC in towns have voiceovers which contribute to atmosphere of a fantasy world, when you talk with them or just passing them they say something.

There are some features that we didn’t explored in this small preview, but we will mention them since they are there, from PVP, Pet System and Housing system, Dragonica seem to have all the features you would need.

In the end Dragonica is a polished and fun free mmorpg game, targeted for kids but not only. While I am somewhat hardcore gamer, where my favorite mmorpg games would be EVE Online, Asherson’s Call, and others, I have to admit I had lots of fun in Dragonica, even with the cute manga graphic direction (not a manga fan), due to the game production value and the presence of about every feature a good mmorpg should have, and more.